Sunday, December 06, 2009

Something is rotten in the capital of Denmark. Prostitutes are offering free sex in protest against a local government campaign urging Copenhagen climate change delegates to steer clear of the city’s brothels.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk, 97 other leaders of governments, 30,000 researchers and delegates from NGOs - plus 5,000 accredited journalists - will not be the only ones showing up this week for the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen. They will be joined by scores of human trafficers and their cargo, if the Copenhagen local government is to be believed.

Copenhagen’s “don’t pay for sex” campaign is in the response - or maybe the fantasy - that the inflow of women sex slaves increases at such large events as the UN climate change conference. The brothels have hit back, saying they will offer free sex. Details of the offer are vague. How will it work? Pay for one bonk, get one free?

The fantasy of thousands of women being trafficked to Copenhagen to service a summit full of tree huggers is a strange one, though, and reminds me of a similar protest by Polish nuns on the eve of the 2006 World Cup in Germany. No such tsunami of human trafficking occurred, but what the hell. These climate change summits attract this kind of miserable-ist, misanthropic loathing of large amounts of humans in one place.

And not being content with warning climate change delegates to steer clear of the bulging brothels, the Danish government has ordered the removal of Christmas trees from the vicinity of the conference halls.

‘We have to remember that this is a UN conference and, as the centre then becomes UN territory, there can be no Christmas trees in the decor, because the UN wishes to maintain neutrality,’ said Denmark’s foreign minister Svend Olling.

Sounds like Copenhagen will be full of more hot air in the coming two weeks than a year’s worth of Poland’s carbon emission permits.

Poland’s Environment Minister resigns

Embarrassingly, Environment Minister Maciej Nowicki - who Super Express calls “Poland‘s least known minister” - has handed in his notice. According to Wprost magazine today, Nowicki claims that he actually has less power than his deputy. Unlike his underling, Nowicki is a non-partisan “expert” in the cabinet and not a Civic Platform member. PM Tusk will not announce the resignation till Tuesday at the next full cabinet meeting. Nowicki will still be going to Copenhagen - hopefully to attend the climate summit and not the brothels - on Monday, however.

Greenpeace hang Tusk in airport

Prime Minister Tusk is one of the targets of Greenpeace protestors at Copenhagen. The environmentalists have hung posters at the city airport with grey-headed heads of government apologising at some future date for not doing more to stop the global warming catastrophe. Tusk joins Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Gordon Brown and others as targets of Greenpeace’s ire.“We're hoping these ads predict the wrong future -- the one where world leaders look back with a "coulda, shoulda, woulda" attitude at a Copenhagen climate summit which failed,” says the Greenpeace web site.

Poland were one of several of the poorer EU states that held out against Brussels presenting too restrictive a position on CO2 targets at a pre-Copenhagen EU summit at the end of October. Warsaw is worried about being dragged into an agreement whereby they would have to help richer EU states to contribute to developing nations to adapt to global warming.

Much to the annoyance of Gordon Brown and leaders of some of the other western European member states, Poland won the argument - getting the size of any contributions to be on a voluntary basis.

Tusk is also eager to hang to the carbon emissions permit sale scam. After Russia and Ukraine, Poland is the holder of the largest carbon emission permits’ surplus in the world, coming in at around 500 million units for the years 2008 to 2012. The country has been negotiating with other countries interested in purchasing the AAU surplus. It has sold permits to Spain and Ireland worth millions of euros which can make contributions to lowering the government budget deficit, which is going up like a hot air balloon at present.

Three out of four Poles believe that global warming is manmade; one in three believe global warming is a threat to Poland and 62 percent think that we should reduce carbon emmissions, even if this means hikes in the cost of electricity.

The survey by PBS-DGA from a sample of 500 (too small a sample of be reliable, but never mind) finds that Poles are more split on whether the government should sacrifice economic growth in the fight against climate change, however, with 53 percent saying that economic growth could be sacrificed to pay for the battle against climate change.

“The survey‘s good news,” said the now former environment minister Maciej Nowicki, pleased with the level of “awareness” of supposed anthropogenic global warming.

But do I het the impression you are saying that the enermies of the climate change brigade are monopoly capitalism? I would disagree. Climate warming has opened up a whole new shindig for them. It's a billion, billion dollar industry now, carbon emmmission credits aside. And why are governments so keen to get on this?

Copenhagen etc is not a threat to capitalism as we know it. It may even be its saviour. Now all big business has to do is a bit of R and D and lots and lots of branding about how Shell etc are going to save the planet.

What I mean is that the modern form in the west soends a very small part of profits on R and D. What they do spend on endlessly is branding. It means you don't havw to innovate your products, you just change the branding.

This is why western economies are so underproductive these days.

Branding and thinking up new ways to get credit are what firms do the best. General Motors, have you noticed, went in to banking, some years ago. Creating finance is much easier than creating a good new model of car.

So greening brands may also help them appear to be more dynamic than they really are. Amd don;t expect the US to upset China too much at Copenhagen. If it weren't for Chinese production then western concumption would have gone POP years ago.

This is correct, aren’t the Danes just the most civilized people, their response to getting angry is to get give away sex.

ge'ez said.. “Greenpeace is not the problem.”

Wrong, too much show biz and no substance. Give these guys a donation and grind your teeth because they like to give themselves a generous paycheck.

Beatroot said.. “This is why western economies are so under productive these days.”

Western economies are the most productive in terms of labour efficiency but have priced their labour at a point that’s no longer competitive in a global market place. The western world still leads in R&D as well as innovation. The problem comes in the form of not being able to compete against China or similar to manufacture something, nobody in North America or Europe can beat the Chinese. They have a huge advantage with direct labour costs; flexible or non-existent labour laws and finally weak environmental regulations. Also not to mention the under valued currency.

There was a complete lack of debate in the US when corporate America decided to out source manufacturing, free trade and fair trade are not identical or interchangeable concepts.

Pretentious? All they talk about is cut cut cut...if you give them a high tech model of alternative energy economies, like fusion nuclear etc...they don;t like it. They don't like modernity.

It’s true, Jan, (hi!) that the US leads the way in R & D, but it is a pitiful record, considering it’s the world’s biggest economy.

According to OECD figures, China spent, in 2006, $136 billion on R&D, beating Japan into third place ($130 billion) against the US ($330 billion).

The trend is even more stark with US forms beginning to fall behind Chinese.

http://www.inc.com/news/articles/200610/china.html

This reflects the fundemental global imbalances. Basically, the US consumes much more than it produces. The only way it can keep that going is by taking credits from surplus created in China etc, which produces much more than it consumes. To do this western economies have to invent more and more weird ways to raise credit and spread it around - hence the finance crisis when the asset boom went pop.

China, India etc are where the dynamic economies are: Copenhagen is one way the west seems to want to slow that down.

57, your indignation over fat paychecks would be much better placed if directed against those of corporate execs and the financiers. But you get kudos for originality in busting the chops of Greenpeacers for being rich fux.

There was and is opposition to outsourcing manufacturing, but its not covered very much in the corporate media. Go figure.

Fusion is generally good jazz but suspect as energy in many ways. Greenpeacers are not all (some may well be) simply naysayers. They have reasons for opposing nuclear fusion which anybody who is genuinely interested in pursuing its pros and cons can do if they want to spend some time.

Good point though about the $$$-driven purpose of limiting China's economic growth through green restrictive measures - problem is that they will never agree to them.

One thing I've been noticing is that the Chinese are sending lots and lots of students to institutions of higher education in the west.

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